Four Startup Companies Receive Commercialization Awards from Carolina KickStart, NC TraCS

Augment Medical, Meryx Pharmaceuticals, Glycan Therapeutics and Spirovation have received a total of $80,000 in commercialization awards from Carolina KickStart, a service of the North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences Institute (NC TraCS). Carolina KickStart awards are designated for UNC start-up companies in the life science, biomedical and pharmaceutical fields. The awards are meant to assist companies with technology validation, product and business development.

Augment Medical is a spinout company from NCSU/UNC’s Biomedical Engineering department. The team is developing PatientLink, a wireless platform to improve the care of disabled patients in the hospital setting. Augment Medical is currently part of the Blackstone Entrepreneurs Network (BEN) and is a National Collegiate Innovators and Inventors Alliance (NCIIA) E-Team Stage 2 company. Augment is led by Tim Martin, MS; Richard Daniels; Daniel Bieber and Andrew DiMeo, PhD.

Meryx Pharmaceuticals is a new spinout company from Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Eshelman School of Pharmacy. In partnership with the National Cancer Institute (NCI), they are developing a novel therapeutic treatment for acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). The team is led by Stephen Frye, PhD; H. Shelton "Shelley" Earp, III, MD; Raj Malik, MD and Anil Goyal, PhD.

Glycan Therapeutics is an early-stage spinout from the Eshelman School of Pharmacy, that is developing therapies for thrombosis and tools to aid research in the study of sugar chains or glycobiology. The team is led by Jian Liu, PhD and Pieter de Ridder, MBA.

Spirovation is a CRO spinout from the UNC School of Medicine and was formed in partnership with UNC’s respiratory departments, led by the Cystic Fibrosis / Pulmonary Research & Treatment Center. Their goal is to accelerate the discovery and development of effective new therapies for respiratory disease. The team is led by David Spencer, PhD and Howard C. Hollar.

KickStart Commercialization Awards promote life-science entrepreneurship on the UNC-CH campus by supporting the commercialization of biomedical innovations. The awards help promote the technical development of a biomedical innovation -- generating preliminary data for an SBIR grant or developing the business case for the innovation. Over the past 4 years, $800,000 in awards has been provided to 22 UNC startups resulting in $10M of additional outside funding.